Wanted: More Open Source Research

Look up open source. You'll get 203,000,000 results. How come? While credit goes to many, including Bruce Perens, who chose the term, I see widespread usage largely as the direct result of a "call to the community" by Eric S. Raymond on 8 February 1998. Plus the runaway successes of Linux, Apache and thousands of other open source code bases, and the Internet they all run on. (And the Net is essentially a pile of open and free protocols.)

I bring these up (and any of us could bring up many more) because (as ESR put it way back when) they have use value rather than sale value. And that use value has enormous leverage. You can make far more money because of these free things than with them. (Something JP Rangaswami and I, among others, call because effects.)

I also bring them up because this kind of leverage is thick with a weird irony: it is both obvious and poorly understood. it is so taken for granted that we neither study it nor learn enough from failures to recognize it.

Take the case of Moveable Type vs. Wordpress. Back in 2004, Moveable Type was an up-and-coming blog authoring system, developed and owned by SixApart. As Mark Pilgrim put it in Freedom 0,

Movable Type came with source code, so hack-minded individuals could add features like threaded comments or IP throttling. You weren’t free to redistribute complete versions of your hacked copy of Movable Type, but you could release patches, and that was free enough. It had a well-designed plug-in architecture, so it could be customized with a dizzying array of third-party plug-ins. You weren’t free to redistribute Movable Type with those plug-ins pre-installed, but you could install the plug-ins separately, and that was free enough.

But SixApart decided to close down Moveable Type and to charge for a bunch of stuff, including comment moderation. A lot of us told the SixApart folks that closing Movable Type was a bad idea, and that instead they should open it up the rest of the way. But they didn't. And, as Mark pointed out in his Freedom 0 post, Wordpress was there to take up the slack:

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. WordPress gives me that freedom; Movable Type does not. It never really did, but it was "free enough" so we all looked the other way, myself included. But Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms. With Movable Type 2.6, I was allowed to run 11 sites. In 3.0, that right will cost me $535.

It would have been nice, back in 2004, to say to Ben and Mena Trott, who created and controlled Moveable Type, "Don't just trust open source weenies like us. Look at this research here."

But there was no research then. In fact there still isn't  not the kind that makes a strong business case.

I bring this up because I'm still trying to make the case for open source, even inside the development community I lead. And it ain't easy. The obvious is not apparent. "Just tell me how I'll make money by giving my code away," they tell me. Pointing at cases like Moveable Type's will help. But research will help more.

Maybe that's because it can't be. Or maybe it's because it's not easy to decide how one will make money on because effects. You still need a with, right? Customers have to pay you for something. What is it? Advertising? Google has sucked most of the oxygen out of that room. Consulting? Can be nice, but it doesn't scale well. What are the others?

We need more answers than we've got. Suggestions (as well as corrections)?

There are other large issues at stake here too. For example, building out the Internet. How should it be done?Friends with connections to the Obama administration explain to me (for example) that "They not only don't get openness like you'd think they should; they actually think verticalization is Good Thing." Also that they don't care if the phone companies "stuff the Internet genie back in the pre-1984 bottle," as long as AT&T and Verizon provide "lots of jobs." More to the point, they don't see how the open Net is a tide that lifts all economic boats, benefitting all companies and not just phone and cable ones. In fact, they see no cost at all to an all-private Internet in which AT&T, Comcast and Verizon replace television with a vast new "content" business. To them the Net is mostly about entertainment distribution, and familiar big distributors provide "lots of jobs" too.

If anything, the Obama administration is more connected to Hollywood and the copyright absolutists than the Bush administration was. ACTA, anyone?

Maybe I'm being an alarmist here, but I don't think the situation has changed a whole lot since I posted Saving the Net here more than four years ago.

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I'm writing a thesis on the economics of OSS, there's a shitload of academic research on the subject. If you want research, use Google Scholar instead of the regular Google search. In short, profit on OSS comes from complementary products, namely:

- Hardware, e.g. IBM (major linux developer) sells mainframes with Linux, Intel (also major linux developer) sells microprocessors that it wants to work perfectly on all platforms.
- Software, e.g. CodeWeavers (creators of Wine) sell CrossOver, a more complete and user-friendly version of Wine, also Novell with StarOffice.
- Services (the most important one of the three), e.g. Red Hat's complete business model. Also, all previous examples come with paid support service.

One strange duckling is Mozilla, who receives a shitload of money from Google by using their search as the default in Firefox. Never really understood that, because Firefox users would still use Google without it being the default.

How is the thesis coming along? Google is simply against Microsoft so that's why they're teaming with Firefox. They can't team up with IE. As you probably are aware by now, they have their own Browser in place.

Open source is rather like ecosystem services in that it's obvious that we can't do without them but we don't know how to value them. Hurricane Katrina made the value of barrier islands and mangrove swamps obvious, rainforests are a sink of CO2, and undammed rivers drop fertile silt on floodplains. Just so, open source provides the oxygen that proprietary software needs to thrive. The question of how to sustain these important "commons" (per Garrett Hardin) appears to be an unsolved economic problem.

Look up proprietary software, you get 12,000,000 results; look up closed source, you get 65,900,000 results; how come? Since open source has five times as many results, it must mean we need more research into why closed source is not as popular amongst people who put up websites. Does it not?